Gochugaru Girl was advised this week to drink more.
It is a good thing the consultant didn’t say I should eat less.
To confess: it wasn’t a medical consultant I sought advice from but a beauty consultant. Or rather, a sales assistant at one of the make-up counters at Liberty Store.
What I like about Liberty is that there are so many brands all vying for attention, that anyone you approach is happy to tell you something about your skin or about their product or just about anything. Sometimes I wonder if I should drop my mother off and let her wander around the store, as the staff are so chatty and there are so many lovely things for her to behold.
But I digress. The problem with my skin is that it is dehydrated and all I need to do is to drink two litres of water a day. Specifically it is water: not juice, beer, wine, coffee or cocktails.
Earlier this year, my friend June paid us a visit here in London and gamely lugged a soya milk maker all the way from Singapore. I cannot imagine drinking just water the whole day long, so for some variation I am having tea and soya milk, although not together as I prefer Chinese tea to English tea.
It is not difficult to make soya milk without a machine but this makes it effortless. You just soak the beans for a few hours or overnight, then place it in the container with the required amount of water. Just press a button and you get hot soya milk in around 20 minutes. I like drinking it with a teaspoon of honey, which reminds me of something my mother said to one of my Primary School teachers.
The teacher had asked my mother for the secret to her beautiful skin and my mother told her that she applied honey to her face every night. I met the teacher again many, many years later and she still talked about my mother’s honey facial.
I really am baffled because no woman in her right mind would apply honey to her face, especially in the tropics, where there are ants. But my mother didn’t change her story and so I might as well recount it here for posterity.
For the sake of completeness I should include a recipe for soya milk made the old-fashioned way, by hand. I remember our maid used to make this all the time but I never showed any interest in making or drinking soya milk when I was younger: the process seemed so messy. I have a new book on making tofu, which requires soya milk in the first instance. I will include the recipe in a future post once I have tried making it without help from a machine.
